f the said wisest men have been mending
ever since. He hates cant on all sides impartially, though, as a sound
Whig, he specially hates Papists and Jacobites as the most offensive of
all Pharisees, marked for detestation by their taste for frogs and
French wine in preference to punch and roast beef. He is a patriotic
Briton, whose patriotism takes the genuine shape of a hearty growl at
English abuses, with a tacit assumption that things are worse elsewhere.

The reflection of this quality of solid good sense, absolutely scorning
any ailment except that of solid facts, is the so-called realism of
Fielding's novels. He is, indeed, as hearty a realist as Hogarth, whose
congenial art he is never tired of praising with all the cordiality of
his nature, and to whom he refers his readers for portraits of several
characters in 'Tom Jones.' His scenery is as realistic as a photograph.
Tavern kitchens, spunging-house parlours, the back-slums of London
streets, are drawn from the realities with unflinching vigour. We see
the stains of beer-pots and smell the fumes of stale tobacco as
distinctly as in Hogarth's engravings. He shrinks neither from the
coarse nor the absolutely disgusting. It is enough to recall the female
boxing or scratching matches which are so frequent in his pages. On one
such occasion his language seems to imply that he had watched such
battles in the spirit of a connoisseur in our own day watching less
inexpressibly disgusting prize-fights. Certainly we could wish that, if
such scenes were to be depicted, there might have been a clearer proof
that the artist had a nose and eyes capable of feeling offence.

But the nickname 'realist' slides easily into another sense. The realist
is sometimes supposed to be more shallow as well as more prosaic than
the idealist; to be content with the outside where the idealist pierces
to the heart. He gives the bare fact, where his rival gives the idea
symbolised by the fact, and therefore rendering it attractive to the
higher intellect. Fielding's view of his own art is instructive in this
as in other matters. Poetic invention, he says, is generally taken to be
a creative faculty; and if so, it is the peculiar property of the
romance-writers, who frankly take leave of the actual and possible.
Fielding disavows all claim to this faculty; he writes histories, not
romances. But, in his sense, poetic invention means, not creation, but
'discovery;' that is, 'a quick, sagacious pene